The Art of the Dust Jacket

On the Powell's Books blog, there's a post about the aesthetic wonder that is the dust jacket.

From the piece...

But a dust jacket serves another purpose: aesthetics. The jacket of a book is meant to entice, much like a candy wrapper seduces you into buying the bar of chocolate it contains. In the case of dust jackets, aesthetics is tied as much to commerce (advertising) as to art. In their original incarnation, dust jackets were the wrapper you threw away in order to access the contents more easily. After all, that was why you purchased the book, to enjoy its contents. What did the wrapper matter? But to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we live in an age of surfaces, where appearance is everything and that which is scarce is granted great value, worthy of being coveted. Where once we threw the wrapper away, the wrapper is now sometimes more highly prized than that which it covered. Art and commerce intertwine.